Still wondering, why no one yet made a cheaper SSD in a 3'5" form-factor with internal resilience. I understand it will need a protocol extension, which can be handled as proprietary encryption commands progressed.Reply

You can't make an SSD any cheaper by going to 3.5" (but this obviously gives you more space for internal resilience). I guess the point why noone is doing this is that you already have hardware and software RAIDs, which can take care of this. Feeding this with regular single drives keeps the supply chain simpler and thus more efficient.Reply

I think the aim is to fill the small niche for people who need uber fast DAS storage but don't have a desktop chassis to stuff the drives in (which would obviously be cheaper). Like someone who wanted to do HD video work on a Macbook Pro.Reply

I notice that their prices WITH drives are both for FOUR drives. If RAID is achieved via an industry-standard RAID controller, is there any reason to believe that one couldn't set up a 3-disk RAID 5 with this device?Reply

You can buy the enclosure by itself and fill it up with whatever drives you prefer. I have a few FCPX editors with a 4-drive SSD (4x 512GB Crucial MX100) RAID-0 on these things and it's really fast.Reply

There are more and less expensive existing SSD media used among other things in 2.5" drives. What I meant is use that cheaper media to populate 3.5" shell. I think it will make a good near-line store for NASes, for photos and whatnot. May report errors through existing SMART. Will simplify product catalogs and IT inventory by having less of storage form-factor diversity. I have seen storage shelves populated with 2.5" SSDs in 3.5" adapters - lots of waste.

And although I did not think about it from the angle you brought up, I still think there may be some (albeit small) savings in a bigger capacity shell's management.Reply